The most far-fetched, stranger-than-fiction tale to come out of Hollywood in our lifetimes receives no Oscars or even applause at this weekend’s Academy Awards. The longtime personifications of the industry’s hard-left politics now shockingly challenge the shibboleths and platitudes pushed by their industry.

Saying in 2003 that Sean Penn or Kevin Costner or Bill Maher someday, here and there, talk as though they read The American Spectator and watch Fox News would strike a lot of people as more outlandish than a movie in which blue people ride in the skies on the backs of flying dragons and swim underwater like fish. …

Of course, Jon Stewart, John Cleese, Russell Brand, and other celebrities offering heterodox thoughts did not go full Charlton Heston. They just subscribed to some views proscribed by an ideology demanding full obedience.

[One has to wonder whether this isn’t a case of Reagan redux. These celebrities may not be abandoning the Left, but rather the Left is abandoning them by becoming even more radical. I think the pandemic opened a lot of eyes, and wokery and cancel-culture censorship may be opening even more. — Ed]